Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Examples

The genus Calidris is paraphyletic, meaning that the birds in this group resemble each other closely despite not being close relatives - a stunning example of convergent evolution that anyone can see for themselves whilst walking along the beaches.

E.g. a fondness for Linnaean taxonomy in paleontology leads pretty rapidly to an acceptance of paraphyletic groups based on overall similarity, which then requires one to subjectively delineate the paraphyletic groups based on some fairly arbitrary “it looks like a pretty big difference to me” criterion.

Far from being a fad, the term "stem group" or "Stammgruppe" has been around since Hennig as a way of referring to a paraphyletic group composed of all members of a total group which are not part of the corresponding crown group.

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The concept "paraphyletic" terms everything except the cladistic confusion of "now" and "then", that is, everything EXCEPT the inconsistent cladistic belief that history can be described unambiguously. It thus terms everything that is not cladistic, that is, everything that does not rest on cladistics' erroneous axiom that classes are real (i.e., typology). It is a generic term for what the ancient Greeks called "barbarians" in their differentiation of "Greeks" and "barbarians" (thus also including aryans in their version of cladistics). It terms a generic denial of everything except cladistics, especially of objectivity (which empirical science rests on). It does, fundamentally, represent a claim that all achievements of empirical science, including Einstein's theory of the relativity of time, is wrong ("unnatural") - that empirical science has got everything up-side-down. It actually represents a revolution against empirical science (i.e., objectivity) resting on the erroneous axiom that classes are real. It is thus, fundamentally, a typological concept of "non-cladistic". Accepting it thus turns you into a cladist. (Fact is that both "para"- and "holophyletic" are "monophyletic" (per definition), and that we have no practical possibility to tell them apart. The cladistic distinction of them can never become anything else than a brain-ghost).

In phylogenetics, a group of organisms is said to be paraphyletic (Greek para = near and phyle = race) if the group contains its most recent common ancestor, but does not contain all the descendants of that ancestor.